friday.saturday.sunday.death.lament.resurrection

sometimes i go on a little kick and carry out a theme in every little place i possibly can carry it out. a few years ago we did a series leading up to easter that focused on the friday-saturday-sunday of holy week and carried it into the metaphor of our real life experiences. friday representing death. saturday representing lament and grief. and sunday representing resurrection and new life. i wrote about it in 2008 in a post called friday saturday sunday living. i brought it back to life a few weeks ago as we are constructing some spiritual reflection stations for our friends at joshua station, who provide transitional housing for families in denver. these three stations–friday, saturday, and sunday–will each represent this rhythm. they will give people a chance to reflect on what’s dead or dying, provide a space to grieve and lament, and a place to notice where new life and resurrection is emerging in their current experience.

and as i am working on this project, i am struck again with how powerful this rhythm is in my own life and experience, and how often i can easily miss each of these “days” along the way. i forget how important it is to lean into the “fridays” of my life and let certain things die. to acknowledge their death. that sometimes good things need to die. and sometimes bad things need to die. that death is a beautiful and important part of the cycle of life as much as i sometimes resist it. it’s also so easy to skip over the value and power of “saturday” and mourning and grief. to live with pain. to let myself feel. to cry and weep and lament. and to not try to rush too quickly through it. i can also easily miss “sunday” and all of the new life that is right before me, even thought it sometimes looks so different than what i expected. that is what i love about the gospels, really. the story is so different from what everyone expected.

i also fleshed out this idea of friday-saturday-sunday a little bit more as it relates to faith & church in my latest post at communitas collective. it’s got the same title as this one: friday.saturday.sunday.death.lament.resurrection.

and just to put the icing on the cake of beating a metaphor to the ground, this past weekend in my fab group of ex-good-christian-women we talked about these same rhythms and took some time to answer these questions together:

what’s dying right now?

how are you grieving it?

what new life is springing forth that needs to be nurtured?

i really would love to hear from you and some of your reactions to this rhythm of death.lament.resurrection in your life. maybe you are seeing it in your personal life or in a significant relationship. or maybe it’s connected to your spiritual journey or church or another part of your current experience.

what is it looking like, feeling like? are you in friday or saturday? do you see some signs of sunday coming yet?